Logitech Touchpad with Windows 8?

Windows 8 was designed to be touch first but you can use it with a keyboard and a mouse. I do that with my work laptop, the beast, which I use to run Windows 8 Client Hyper-V for deployment demos because it has SSD storage. But what if you want that touch experience? Some apps, certainly games (Cut the Rope, Angry Birds) work best with a touch UI. You could go out and buy a replacement monitor for you PC. You could replace your laptop. Or you could go the Apple route and copy what they did for the Mac a while back when they introduced the pricey track pad.

I was just in the store picking up a new keyboard and mouse for some writing work (the real thing always beats a laptop keyboard/pad) and I saw something interesting on a display stand:

This is the Logitech Wireless Touchpad with Multitouch, coming in at $32.57 on Amazon.com. It supports single, double, triple and quad touch as well as swipe. Locally it was €49.99 in a brick store. I very nearly picked one up but I was concerned that it might not be a great Windows 8 device; I’ve seen some people having Synaptic driver issues on forums with gesture support on their laptops. I did a quick search on my iPhone but found nothing conclusive so I left it there.

I returned home but didn’t forget it. I did some more searching and found one very happy reviewer. Maybe I’ll get one for the work PC which I’m very likely to upgrade as soon as possible after RTM.

That reminds me. I love to see what’s happening in the PC world, especially to the all-in-ones. If I was buying a personal PC then that’s the type I’d want for Windows 8. I saw a very sexy looking Lenovo IdeaCenter A720.

It is around $1700 in the USA and €1200 here. It features a 27 inch 1920×1080 anti-glare 10-touch point screen with a flush bezel. The spec is i7 (3rd generation), 8 GB RAM, 2 GB NVIDIA GPU. It was a work of art in my opinion; I’d be happy for it to be placed in my sitting room.

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About this Blog

This blog serves 2 purposes. Firstly, I want to share information with other IT pros about the technologies we work with and how to solve problems we often face. I've worked with technologies from the desktop to the server, Active Directory, System Center, security and virtualisation.

Secondly, I use my blog as a notebook. There's so much to learn and remember in our jobs that it's impossible to keep up. By blogging, I have a notebook that I can access from anywhere. It has saved my proverbial many times in the past.

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Anything you do to your IT infrastructure, applications, services, computer or anything else is 100% down to your own responsibility and liability. Aidan Finn bears no responsibility or liability for anything you do. Please independently confirm anything you read on this blog before doing whatever you decide to do.